Movie Review | Sentimental Value

Full of clear northern light and personal crisis, Sentimental Value felt almost like a throwback film for me. It explores emotions not as an adjunct to the main, action-driven plot but as the very subject of the movie itself.

Sentimental Value
Directed by Joachim Trier – 2025
Reviewed by Garrett Rowlan

The film stars Stellan Skarsgård as Gustav Borg, a 70-year-old director who returns to Oslo to stir up interest in a film he wants to make, while health and financing in an era dominated by bean counters still allow it. He hopes to film at the family house and cast his daughter Nora, a renowned stage actress in her own right, as the lead. However, Nora struggles with intense stage fright and other personal issues. She rejects the role, disdaining the father who abandoned the family when he left her and her sister Agnes as children. In response, Gustav lures a “name” American actress, Rachel Keys (Elle Fanning), to play the part.

Sentimental Value, written by director Joachim Trier and Eskil Vogt, delves into sibling dynamics, the healing power of art, and how family trauma can be passed down through generations. Yet the film also has moments of sly humor, such as when the often oblivious Gustav gives his nine-year-old grandson a birthday DVD copy of Gaspar Noé’s dreaded Irreversible, something intense and highly inappropriate.

For me, the film harkens back to the works of Ingmar Bergman. The three sisters (with Elle Fanning playing a kind of surrogate sister) reminded me of the three siblings in Bergman’s 1972 Cries and Whispers. In another sequence, the shot composition of Gustav and his two daughters, their faces blending, recalls the iconic fusion of Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson’s faces in Persona.

It’s the acting that truly carries the film. Special mention goes to Renate Reinsve, who portrays the troubled yet talented Nora, and Stellan Skarsgård as Gustav, an actor unafraid to take on unlikable characters (I still remember him shooting a dog in the original Insomnia). In both cases, the subtle play of emotions—especially when those emotions are constrained—across the actors’ faces is a joy to watch. Elle Fanning and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas (who plays Agnes, the other sister with her own set of issues) are both excellent.

It’s hardly a Christmas movie, but more deeply, it’s a winter film, full of emotions set in a cold climate.

> Playing at Landmark Pasadena Playhouse, Laemmle Glendale, and AMC The Americana at Brand 18.